Disclaimer: There will be typos probably, I’m typing fast and just letting my mind go crazy.
3/5/2022
After a time of grief and sorrow, I’m back to working on my story, Saviors of Novus. This difficult time in my life has taught me so much about myself, and reinforced the emotions I have surrounding my passion for creating stories. My Grandfather inspired my love of stories and history, and taught me how they can be used to inspire and encourage. I intend to do everything I can to honor his legacy, and live a life that would make him proud.
In this entry, I will be writing about the city tentatively named Astrum, the capital city of Novus. When I first envisioned this place, my first thought was it needs to represent a society solely built upon scientific reasoning and logistical efficiency. The Novusion people are primarily farmers, food and purified water production are the most important foundations to the survival of any colony, whether it be on earth or somewhere among the stars. The entire city is surrounded by farming sectors that are separated into enormous triangular shapes that evenly surround the city center. Imagine a giant evenly cut pizza, except the inner circle of the pizza is a great city.
The exact circumference of this “pizza” is to be determined, but it spans hundreds if not thousands of kilometers. As I delved into the study of farming, and farming practices, I discovered an interesting concept. The entire colony is a clock, and the hands of this clock are the crops themselves. After every season, the crops are literally rotated clockwise to the next field, while one farming sector is allowed to rest and no crops are grown within it. Depending on the number of farming sectors I establish, each one will be allowed to rest once every six or seven earth years. So if a time-lapse were to be made that spanned decades, you would be able to see the crops rotating along, acting as the big hand, and the one sector that’s allowed to rest each season would be the small hand so to speak. These are meant to be large enough to see from orbit, so one could potentially determine how much time has passed since the season they were in when they left, potentially. The visual representation is important for story telling, and its something characters can comment on when viewing their home from space. Below is a basic visual example of how the farmland would surround the city.
While this colony has existed for some time at this point in the story, the Novusion people are still learning to perfect farming on their new world. Things don’t always go the way they want it to, and these farmers face similar obstacles that farmers face today. I’m still determining how many animals, or livestock, we would actually bring with us to a new world. What risks would we be taking by doing so? What effect would they have on a new world? Especially one with primitive vegetation such as Novus. While I make that calculation, one of the “crops” farmers will grow on Novus will be lab grown meat. Now whether I’m for such an idea or not is not relevant, what is relevant, is that it does exist today in a prototype like stage. So, wouldn’t it be interesting to have literal meat farmers in the future if it were to become practical and nutritionally beneficial for us? We wouldn’t have to spend resources on taking care of livestock, and spending years raising them, however, there are great psychological benefits from raising livestock. Learning to care for another living creature inspires kindness, a good work ethic, and a sense of purpose. The negative side effects of removing that from society completely, will be exploited by myself when telling this story. It will be one of the many side effects of creating such a society as the Novusions have, that will ultimately lead to problems, problems that will eventually drive the main plot of the story on a grand scale.
Problems are a great way to move a plot forward, but I understand that a story only driven by issues and problems will become tiring, exhausting, and not necessarily inspiring. Which is why these issues will only be brought into the light when absolutely necessary, and at the right moment. My story aims to be beautiful where beauty is not often found, and to be inspiring in the small moments that humans can experience with one another. This is the most confident I’ve been about anything I’ve ever created, and I’m so glad that I’ve had the patience to endure and keep on keeping on, even when I thought I had no good ideas left. I hope that if anyone reading this feels the spark of creativity leaving them, don’t give up on yourself, I’m sure you will find your way, you just have to keep searching. The most valuable of treasures are not so easily found, and we each have something buried within ourselves that only requires some effort to find. Hmmm, you know what, I’m keeping that for some dialogue!
Anyways, what was I writing about? Back to Astrum.
While most of the colony is farmland, in the center, lies a shining metropolis, Astrum. The city is nearly visible from the outskirts of the outer edges of the farming sectors, but if you couldn’t see it, you would still know its there. Like a black hole, you can determine something exists beyond the horizon based upon the effects it has on the surrounding environment. Spacecraft dropping in from orbit all day would be one such effect. It is required that all spacecraft enter Novus’ atmosphere beyond the colony’s borders so as to not completely overwhelm the area with noise pollution, and it decreases any risks of a spacecraft crashing into anything valuable if something were to happen during re-entry. As a result of this directive, just as we have air traffic on earth along specific “lanes,” Novus has its own shipping lanes with spacecraft flying to the center from beyond the borders of the colony, to the central spaceport in Astrum, and then from Astrum directly back into space. You could view the shipping traffic as convection.
The circular design of this city allows an efficient transport system to be established. Food from the farms are easily transported to the city center where it can be evenly dispersed to where its needed most. These lanes of transport can be found in between each farming sector and act as borders that separate them. Like veins in our bodies they carry nutrients to all parts of the city and to its people.
I’m still working on the architectural theme the city will have, but I have a few ideas, just need to narrow down which one will fit best with the other themes of the story, everything needs to be connected.
As far as the city and colony itself goes, this as much as I’m willing to share at this moment. There will be plenty more entries covering the finer details of this city in the future. I hope you enjoyed reading about Astrum and its farms, its certainly very fun to work on and conceptualize. I hope you have a great day and return for future entries, and eventually, the finished product, Saviors of Novus.